LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 

©feat, f atmrigfrt Jto. 

£H4. 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



Jttcssagc 
of 

JltfSttS 
to 

of 



Rev. George D. 
Herron. 



A Traft for the Times. 




Published by 
Fleming H. 
Revell 
Company, 
New York. 
Chicago. 



. • . BY THE SAME AUTHOR . • . 

ZTbe %at(jev GbtfSt. By Rev. George 
D. Herron. ..."/» Press. 

" The discovery of Christ is the need 
of our times. The search for some law 
of justice between man and man, the 
search for remedies for social ills, is 
essentially a search after Christ. In a 
larger sense, in its widest and most 
complex spheres of activity, the world 
has yet to find Christ. It is the im- 
perative duty of the day that Christ's 
disciples shall discover, and reveal Him 
in larger relations to human society." 

New York. Fleming H. Revell Co. Chicago. 



THE 



MESSAGE OF JESUS 



To Men of Wealth. 



REV. GEORGE D. HERRON. 



Introduction by Rev. Josiah Strong, D. D. 

AUTHOR OF " OUR COUNTRY." 



: : Jflemtng f>. iRevell Co. : : 



New York : 
12 bible house, astor place. 



Chicago : 
148 and 150 madison street. 



Ipubltebers of Evangelical ^Literature* 



3*1 



AN ADDRESS 
DELIVERED BEFORE THE MINNESOTA 
CONGREGATIONAL CLUB. 



Copyrighted 1891 by Fleming H. Revell Company. 



INTRODUCTION. 

Among the notable signs of the times is what might 
be called, for lack of a better term, the intellectual 
supremacy of Jesus Christ. He has always commanded 
the conscience even when the will has rebelled. For 
nineteen hundred years men have acknowledged Him 
to be the loftiest exemplar of all moral excellence 
even though they refused to follow in His footsteps. 
Men have willingly conceded to Him the deepest spirit- 
ual insight and the highest authority touching religious 
truth, even though they deemed the Sermon on the 
Mount inapplicable to practical life. They are now 
beginning to see that His Words contain the solution of 
the great problems of this life, as well as of that which is 
to come ; that He is the Saviour of society no less than 
of individual souls ; that to disregard His teachings is 
poor statesmanship and bad political economy as well 
as bad morals and irreligion. 

Property is one of the central facts of civilization. 
Its production, transportation and distribution, engage 
men's industries ; its acquisition is the common object 
of endeavor ; the love of it is the root of all evil. It 
would have been strange indeed if the Great Teacher had 
had little or nothing to say concerning so great a factor 
in human life. As a matter of fact he had very much 
to say concerning it, not only by way of illustration) 
but also touching the fundamental principles of its use. 
" The Message of Jesus to Men of Wealth," is therefore 
a vital theme. No one is competent to interpret or 
discuss that message who is not in close spiritual fel- 
lowship with the Great Teacher,. for He did not divide 
His teachings into temporal and spiritual any more than 
He separated duties into secular and sacred. We sus- 



INTRODUCTION. 



pect that truth is one as God is, that the whole of any 
one truth is all truth, and that all truths are spiritual 
as all duties are sacred. 

The writer of " The Message of Jesus to Men of 
Wealth" was well fitted for his task. He is a man to 
whom the truths which we call spiritual are profoundly 
and supremely real. He has a passion to take of the 
things of God and show them to his fellow-men. He 
has a deep insight into the meaning of the cross be- 
cause he has had a deep experience of its power, and 
holds with a firm faith that the cross, which is the 
heart of the gospel, is the power of God unto the salva- 
tion not only of men but of man. 

It is no wonder that Mr. Herron's paper attracted 
attention when read before the Congregational Club of 
Minnesota. A secular paper said of it : " Each sen- 
tence was an acorn wherein a forest was already pent 
up. No one could have listened to the essay, delivered 
as it was with an earnestness burning at the white heat 
without feeling that it was the result of months and 
years of mental toil and moral and spiritual travail." 
And an editorial of the Christian Union in which it was 
first published, says : " It is electric, and needs not the 
impassioned utterance of the speaker to give it em- 
phasis. It flashes with a fire that is internal, and con- 
tains even more than it imparts." It is now published 
in a more permanent and convenient form at the request 
of many leaders of Christian thought and is worthy of 
the widest circulation. 

JOSIAH STRONG. 

New York. 



THE MESSAGE OE JESUS 



Co ZtTeti of VOtaltl). 



I AM appointed to present to you, this 
evening, what I understand to be the 
message of Jesus to men of wealth, and 
to apply that message to the problems 
of society which the best thought and 
truest sympathy of our times are reaching 
out to solve. I assume, in what I shall say, 
that I am addressing an audience of Christ's 
disciples. 

In their essence, the social problems of 
to-day are not different from those of yes- 
terday ; they are as old as society itself. 
They date back to the infancy of the race, 
when sin couched at the door of Adam's 
eldest son, to spring up within his heart a§ 



6 Cfye Ztlessage of 3 esus 



hatred for his younger brother. Ever 
since Cain — whom President Hitchcock calls 
" that first godless political economist " — 
killed his brother Abel, the associability of 
human beings for good and common ends 
has been a problem ; a problem, be it kept 
in mind, born in a heart of covetousness, 
and set by the hand of hate for the race to 
solve. Cain's murder of his brother Abel 
was the first bald, brutal assertion of self- 
interest as the law of human life — an asser- 
tion always potential with murder.; an asser- 
tion whose acceptance involves the triumph 
of the brute man over the God-imaged man ; 
an assertion which the divine heart of 
humanity has always denied ; a theory of 
society which will be remembered as a 
frightful dream of the past when the race 
recovers its moral sanity. Cain's hands 
were the first to grasp and wield compe- 
tition as the weapon of progress ; a weapon 
from which no economic theorists have ever 
been able to wash the blood of human suf- 
fering. When Cain replied to God, "Am I 



Co 2tten of XDealtlj. 1 



my brother's keeper?" he stated the ques- 
tion to which all past and present problems 
of man's earthly existence are reducible. 
The search for the final and comprehensive 
answer to Cain's question has been the 
race's sacred sorrow ; and obedience to such 
an answer would carry in it the perfect solv- 
ent of all the problems that perplex the 
minds and hearts of men. 

Cfye Dream of tf?e Ctges, 

History and prophecy have always pointed 
toward a time of industrial peace and social 
brotherhood. The most unselfish aspira- 
tions of the noblest men have been along 
the line of the social unity of the race. 
About this hope statesmen and philosophers 
have woven their sublimest theories of 
society and government. It has been the 
highest inspiration of poetry. It is the end 
toward which Moses and Plato looked. It 
is the lofty strain borne along from prophet 
to prophet through Israel's glory and 
shame. Outside of Biblical prophecy there 



8 Cfye ZtTessage of 3*$^$ 



is no purer expression of this ancient hope 
than in John Stuart Mill's autobiography: 
" I yet looked forward/' he says, "to a time 
. . . . when the division of the produce 
of labor, instead of depending, as in so great 
a degree it now does, on the accident of 
birth, will be made by an acknowledged 
principle of justice ; and when it will no 
longer be, or be thought to be, impossible 
for human beings to exert themselves 
strenuously in procuring benefits which are 
not to be exclusively their own, but to be 
shared by society to which they belong." 

And yet, with all the history and proph- 
ecy, the schools and temples, the philosophy 
and poetry, the governments and civiliza- 
tions, the day of brotherhood seems no 
nearer than generations ago. The hope 
grows faint with age. The problems of so- 
ciety are still unsolved. 

The question of Cain is the master ques- 
tion of our age. It has grown articulate 
with the greed and cruelty of history. It 
threatens our American day and nation with 



Co ttten of JDedfy 9 



the crisis of the centuries. It must be an- 
swered; and answered with justice and 
righteousness. The blood of Abel cries out 
through toiling millions. The expectation 
of the poor shall not forever perish in hope- 
less toiling and longing for better days. As 
John Ruskin says, " There are voices of bat- 
tle and famine through all the earth, which 
must be heard some day, whoever keeps 
silence. ,, No arrogant reply as to the his- 
toric and legal rights of private and corpor- 
ate property will silence these voices. 

Cipiltjation Cannot fulfill tfye Dreams of 
Social 3 U5 ^ ce * 

The natural development of our civiliza- 
tion will not unfold the solution of our in- 
dustrial problems. When we watch the mam- 
moth enginery of this modern civilization 
through the assurances of a partisan press, or 
the mercenary declamation of the politician 
who estimates the moral stupidity of the 
people by his own, the movements of its 
great wheels seem wonderfully safe and per- 



10 £fye Zltessage of 3^us 



feet ; but when we, in our sober, honest, 
thoughtful moments, view it through the 
sympathies and purposes of the divine Man 
of Sorrows, we see torn, bleeding, mangled, 
sorrowing, famishing multitudes beneath the 
wheels of its remorseless enginery ; we see 
that greed and not love is the power that 
moves our civilization ; we see politics, com- 
merce, and the social club moving on the 
economic assumption that selfishness is the 
only considerable social force, and assuming 
that civilization can advance only through 
the equal balancing of warring, selfish inter- 
ests ; we see men valuing brute cunning and 
the low instinct of shrewdness more than 
whiteness of soul. 

A civilization based on self-interest, and 
securing itself through competition, has no 
power within itself to secure justice. We 
speak to pitiless forces when we appeal to 
its processes to right the wrongs and ine- 
qualities of society. The world is not to be 
saved by civilization. It is civilization that 
needs saving. A civilization basing itself 



Co VTun of XDealtf}. 11 



upon self-interest has a more dangerous 
foundation than dynamite. It is built upon 
falsehood. It carries in it the elements of 
anarchy because it has no ground in moral 
realities. It is atheistic because it treats 
God and his righteousness as external to 
itself. It is nihilistic because it thrives on 
destruction. It is a civilization which 
Bishop Huntington declares " leads by a 
sure course to barbarism. " It is a civiliza- 
tion under whose procession John Stuart 
Mill affirms the very idea of " justice, or 
any proportionality between success and 
merit, or between success and exertion," to 
be " so chimerical as to be relegated to the 
region of romance. " The end to which the 
civilization of the present tends is material, 
and not moral ; it tends to the enslavement 
of society and the smothering of its highest 
life. Civilization is the flower of the char- 
acter of the dominant classes ; it is an ef- 
fect more than a cause ; its forces originate 
in character ; its activities are the expression 
gf the people's being. No civilization can be 



12 Oje ZtTessage of 3 e *us 



made righteous, or can make itself righteous, 
by any restraints or regulations external to 
itself. A righteous civilization can have no 
other source than the inward righteousness 
of those who originate and control its forces. 

tEfye 3 m Potett c Y °f Abstract Crutfj. 

There is no power in abstract truth, either 
economic, ethical, or theological, to cure our 
social ills. Economic laws naturally deal 
with things external to man's being; with 
principles which will be accepted or rejected 
according to inward forces of character which 
they can obey, but cannot control. Ethical 
truth taught to an unspiritualized race, or 
generation, or civilization, is a childish w r aste 
of time and strength. There are no ethics 
apart from religion. The springs of human 
virtue are all in God. There is no ethical 
truth other than the expression of the will of 
God. Socrates, Plato and Shakespeare seem 
to have understood this better than some of 
us who teach our fellow-men to-day. Nearly 
all the warnings of the Old and New Testa- 



Co Zlten of IDealt^ 



13 



ment, which we so self-assuringly address to 
so-called unbelievers, were addressed in the 
first place to those who presumed them- 
selves to be already in the kingdom of God ; 
to those in the temple services and the 
churches. The ethical instructions of Jesus 
and the Apostles were all based upon and 
developed from the cross. Theological 
truth has repeatedly shown its barrenness of 
the fruit of righteousness. The darkest 
crimes of history have been committed by 
the conservators of religion. A jealousy for 
theological truth often accompanies a ha- 
tred of duty. The Pharisees were so ortho- 
dox that they crucified Christ for heresy. 
They possessed the oracles of God. Yet 
the truth did not save them from greedy, 
heartless, malignant, hypocritical lives. A 
slavish and enslaving conservatism has 
always joined hands with an indifferent 
worldlyism for the crucifixion of God's per- 
ennial revelations of incarnate truth. I sus- 
pect the devil knows more truth than any of 
us ; and he is all the more devilish for know- 



14 Cfye ZlTessage of 3 esus 

ing it. Truth that does not strike its roots 
in love is a curse ; and the truer the truth 
the more accursed its results. There is a 
pregnant thought, which the Church has yet 
to learn, in a saying of Mozoomdar's in his 
"Oriental Christ ": " Unless our creeds fer- 
tilize the world, and our lives furnish meat 
and drink to mankind, the curse uttered on 
barrenness will descend on us." 

^ope, Xtot in tfye State* 

We cannot look to the State to solve our 
social woes and grant our social hopes. All 
the great political prophets, from Moses to 
Milton, and from Milton to Sumner and 
Mulford, recognize that the people are the 
makers of the State rather than the State 
the makers of the people. The State is the 
expression of the highest common thought 
of the people ; it is the work of the people's 
faith. Hegel says " the State is the realiza- 
tion of the moral idea" of the people. The 
people must be righteous before the State 
can be righteous. If we agree with Milton 



Co nten of XDealt^ 



15 



that the State " ought to be but as one 
huge Christian personage, one mighty 
growth or stature of an honest man," then 
the Christian State must be the offspring of 
a Christian people. If we regard the State, 
with Sumner, as a grand moral institution, it 
must be moral because the people build it 
with their moral thought and purpose. The 
best and strongest institutions have been 
powerless to restrain people whose moral 
conceptions they did not embody. The 
Mosaic legislation was never fully enforced. 
Roman law could find no expression in the 
thought and life of later Rome. Alfred the 
Great incorporated the Ten Commandments 
and Golden Rule in the early English con- 
stitution, but they are yet far from being the 
laws of English industrial and social life. 
Laws written on tables of stone and printed 
in statute books are but the playthings of 
politicians if they are not written in people's 
hearts. Laws cannot make men unselfish. 
They can restrain ; but all legal righteousness 
is but temporary. Police righteousness is 



16 €fy> Ittesscige of 3esus 



not divine righteousness. Force-justice is 
unreal justice. The State cannot, by any 
possible process, make the rich man unself- 
ish, or the poor man thrifty. The State 
cannot establish justice and righteousness 
on the earth ; but justice and righteousness 
must establish the State. Except the State 
be born again, it cannot see the Kingdom 
of God. 

"Cfye ^eart Disease of Society*" 

The heart of all our social disputes is what 
Mulford calls " the crude assertion of an en- 
lightened self-interest as a law of human 
activity." This assertion is the essence of 
the gospel which Professor Sumner pro- 
claims from his chair in a great Christian 
university. Social classes, he decides, owe 
each other nothing; benevolence is simply 
barter, and " the yearning after equality the 
offspring of envy and covetousness." This 
is a gospel which would have caused the 
proclaimer to be mobbed in the streets of 
Athens in the days of Pericles; a gospel 



Co VTun of IDealt^ 17 



which would have astounded Moses, and 
seemed ancient and barbarous to Abraham. 
The supremacy of the law of self-interest is 
the conclusion of Herbert Spencer's ma- 
terialistic philosophy ; and of the wretched 
pessimism of Hartmann and Schopenhauer. 
It is the principle upon which Cain slew his 
brother. It was the seductive whisper of 
the serpent in Eve's ear. It is the principle 
upon which crime is committed. It is the 
principle upon which the capitalist acts who 
treats labor as no more than a commodity 
subject to the lowest market rate and the 
law of supply and demand. It is the princi- 
ple upon which railroads are bonded and 
bankrupted for private ends. It is the law 
by which the New England deacon chattels 
his money upon the Dakota farmer's meager 
possessions at a usurious and impoverishing 
rate of interest — a deed which will not be 
obscured from the eyes of a just God by the 
endowment of a chair in a denominational 
college. It is the principle upon which a 
Chicago financier proceeds with no more 



18 



Ct?e XTtessage of 3esu£ 



moral justification than the highwayman's 
robbery of an express train, to " corner " the 
pork market, and thus force from the 
hungry mouths of toiling families a million 
and a half of dollars into his private treasury 
—a deed for which the giving of some 
thousands to found city missions and 
orphans' homes will be no atonement in the 
reckoning of the'God who judges the world 
in righteousness and not by the ethics of the 
stock exchange. The law of self-interest is 
the eternal falsehood which mothers all so- 
cial and private woes ; for sin is pure indi- 
vidualism — the assertion of self against God 
and humanity. 

Cfye DtPtne Hemeby* 

God's answer to Cain's question, God's 
solvent of the social problems of our day, is 
the cross. And the cross is more than an 
historic event. It is the law by which God 
acts, and expects men to act. It is the 
creed of God which will never be revised. 
It is the principle upon which creation and 



£o XTCen of UOzalfy. 19 



history proceed. It was the assertion intensi- 
fied which God has been making through all 
history, of self-sacrifice as the law of human 
development and achievement. Self-sacri- 
fice is the law which God asserts in Christ 
over against the law of self-interest which 
Satan asserts in Cain. The trial in progress 
is Christ versus Cain. The decision to 
which the times are hastening us is, Shall 
Christ or Cain reign in our American civili- 
zation? And well may the heavens await 
our decision in silent and awful wonder; for 
we are deciding the destiny of the earth ! 

tDje ZtTessage of ^tsus. 

The message of Jesus to every man, rich 
or poor, weak or strong, ignorant or wise, is 
the cross. In whatsoever form he puts it, 
whether in parable or principle, miracle or 
command, the cross is the heart of every 
message : not a cross, but his cross — the 
cross of absolute self-renunciation which he 
carried in his heart. In Christ's teachings 
the cross was something else than an arbi- 



20 tEfje ZHessage of 3esus 



trary contrivance for populating heaven. 
The Gospel of our Lord knows of no recon- 
ciliation by the cross that does not begin 
with a reconciliation to the cross. Being 
reconciled to God has a vaster meaning than 
being reconciled to the comfortable recep- 
tion of certain benefits from God's hand. It 
means the apprehension of the law of God's 
life as the law of our lives. And sacrifice is 
the law of the life of God. The creation in- 
volved an infinite sacrifice. Out of the 
travail of God humanity was born. Before 
earth's sinning, sorrowing ages began, with 
infinite sorrow God consented within him- 
self to their beginning. The sorrow of 
Gethsemane was in God's heart before he 
breathed life into man ; and the suffering of 
the cross continues in the Father-heart till 
sin vanishes from the hearts of his children. 

The moral progress of the race has been 
through sacrifice. It is the divine order of 
culture. The race's divinest types are al- 
was dying that the race may live. The 
world has thriven on the sufferings of those 



Co VTun of JDealfy. 21 



who have loved it and given themselves for 
it. Every new truth which men have 
learned has been read in the blaze of martyr 
fires. Every great reform has been won at 
unreckonable cost. A Calvary is the trib- 
ute Freedom always claims from men. 
Every commercial privilege which an Ameri- 
can enjoys was purchased on Golgotha. 
We are not our own ; and that which we 
have is not ours. Every breath of our 
bodies and every opportunity of our hands, 
hearts, and brains was bought for us with 
immeasurable sacrifice. Our little lives are 
surcharged with the blood-bought wealth of 
the centuries ; and not one of us, if we could 
live to the age of Methuselah, and held in 
our grasp the wealth of the continents, could 
begin to pay the future the debt we owe the 
past. Sacrifice is not life's accident, but 
life's law./ No man has a moral right to live 
other than a sacrificial life in this world of 
sin and sacrifice. Lotze affirms that no life 
is moral which is not self-sacrificed in the 
service of others. No Christian is true to 



22 tEfye ZKessage of ^sus 



his Christ, nor has grasped the meaning of 
the cross, who is not a vicarious sufferer for 
his fellow-men. The cross was not our re- 
lease from, but our obligation to, sacrifice. 
And whenever there is a heart throbbing 
with the passion of Jesus there will be a life 
straitened till its mission be accomplished. 
Wherever there is a soul pulsing with the 
life of God there will always be sacrificial 
hands uplifting humanity to higher things. 

Now, the reason this message of the cross 
has so much larger an application to men of 
wealth is that they have the larger oppor- 
tunities and possessions to sacrifice. They 
have the weapons of love. Christ offers no 
different terms of discipleship to any Ameri- 
can man of wealth than he offered to Matthew 
at his custom-table. The centuries have not 
bulged the needle's eye. It is as hard to 
enter now as when Christ mentioned its 
smallness to the rich Pharisees. Christ was 
infinitely pitiful to the weak, the poor, the 
thriftless, the sinful, the ignorant ; but to 
those who sought to hallow covetousness 



Co ttten of &eai% 23 



with religious forms, and convert piety into 
a cloak for greed, he had but wrath and 
scorn and scourges. 

The simple fact of our industrial situation 
is that the men of wealth in our American 
churches can begin to solve our pressing 
social problems any time they choose, by 
simply being disciples of the Lord Christ. 
As the Father sent Christ into the world to 
sacrifice himself in the service of man, so 
Christ sends the corporation manager, the 
merchant, the mill owner, the mine operator, 
the street-railway president, to be a living 
sacrifice in the service of men. Christ was 
under no more obligation to consecrate him- 
self wholly to the world-saving, man-uplift- 
ing business than every business man in 
America. The uniqueness of Christ's work 
has no bearing upon this fact. The claim of 
God to Christ's service is the claim that 
rests upon us all. The Lord did not die to 
give us an opportunity for self-seeking. We 
are not here on a vacation from God. He 
sends every man of wealth forth to be a 



24 Cfje 2Ttessa$e of 3estt$ 



savior of his fellow-men ; and the business 
man who fails to be a little Christ to the 
world has made a disastrous and irreparable 
business failure. A man of business has no 
more right to make personal profit the su- 
preme purpose of his store, his shop, his 
capital, his factory, his railway, than Jesus 
had to work miracles for personal profit. 
We have no more moral right than our Lord 
to direct our social, domestic, or financial 
affairs for personal ends. The Christian has 
no more right to an unconsecrated horse, or 
house, or dress, than Christ to an unconse- 
crated cross. We are not our own ; we are 
bought with a price ; and nothing short of 
an unreserved surrender of self-interest to 
God's interest in humanity is moral or just. 
Not to be self-sacrificing in others' service is 
injustice. To be unloving, even to the un- 
lovable, is to be ungodly. 



Co Zttcrt 6f IDeaitf?. 25 



Cfye (Efyrtstocrattc ftingbotru 

The day is coming when the homes, the 
shops, the stores, the social clubs, the news- 
papers, the corporations, the political cau- 
cuses, that have not for their sacred purpose 
the making of men divine will be regarded 
as out of place in a world that has been re- 
deemed by the Son of God and nourished 
by the life-blood of his saints. There is no 
such thing as a secular affair in the universe 
of God. There is nothing but moral anar- 
chy outside of the realm of God's authority. 
God recognizes nothing as having a right to 
exist apart from a vital relation to himself. 
There is no affair which engages human pas- 
sions, brains, hearts, hands, that is not a 
religious matter. Nothing has a moral right 
to an existence on the earth which has any 
other basic purpose than the uplifting and 
sustaining of men in righteousness. The 
basing of commerce, or education, or politics, 
or society, on the modern atheistic and mer- 
cantile idea of secularity is an assumption 



28 CJ?e fttessage of 3esus 



that violates the lesson of history, and is in- 
tolerable to the Scriptures. Christ is King ! 
Unto him every knee shall bow. The free- 
dom of the race is to be reached only 
through yielding to Christ's moral despot- 
ism. As President Valentine has said, 
" There is nothing under the stars that is 
not amenable to his authority." There are 
no exemptions provided for stock exchanges, 
or wholesale establishments, or railway cor- 
porations, or social leaders, or politicians, or 
teachers of natural sciences. Whatsoever ye 
do, in word or deed, do all in the name of 
the Lord Jesus. We have no moral right to 
dress simply with a view to pleasing our- 
selves ; eat as we please ; live in the kind of 
homes we please ; ride in the carriages we 
please ; have the company we please ; buy 
the books, pictures, jewelry, luxuries we 
please — no more than Christ had. 

I am aware that what I am saying is irri- 
tating to the practical, untheocratic age — an 
age which has small sense of the divineness 
of things. We have little practical use for 



Co IHen of XDealty. 27 



things we cannot buy or sell ; things that do 
not minister to our bodily comfort and social 
pride. We are apt to measure even the re- 
ligious value of men by their market value. 
We are willing enough that Christ should 
have been crucified for us, but are angered 
at the thought of being crucified for him. 
It is so much easier to worship Christ than 
go up and share with him his cross. It is so 
much easier to be obsequious in saying 
Lord, Lord, than it is to do the things he 
tells us ; so much easier to subscribe to 
creeds and repeat rituals than renounce sel- 
fish ownership to one's possessions and deny 
one's self. But only a crucified Christianity 
will ever be able to win a selfish world to the 
crucified Christ. And there is no other 
name under heaven given among men 
whereby society and civilization can be 
saved. Not until the race shall have been 
crucified with Christ's crucifixion will it as- 
semble with clasped hands and free spirits 
around the throne of the Lamb. 

Men first quarreled with God, and they 



28 tCfye Zltessage of 3 esu * 



have been quarreling with each other ever 
since. And the reconciliation of men to 
each other must proceed through their rec- 
onciliation to God as he is revealed in 
Christ. Social unity must be the result of 
God-one-ness and God-in-ness. It will be the 
outgrowth of the incarnation of the divine 
sacrificial Christ-life in the life of human- 
ity. When men touch each other with the 
touch of God, and love each other with the 
love of God, and serve each other with the 
sacrificial heart of God, then the race will be 
one concordant family. The solvent of 
every problem of society is the love of God. 
And the cross is the weapon which God 
took from his own heart to break open our 
hearts that he might pour therein the life- 
renewing balm of his love. Our hope for 
social freedom will reach its fulfillment, not 
through social mechanisms, but through our 
acting, as Frederick Maurice says, "in the 
faith that the constraining love of Christ is 
the mightiest power in the universe." So- 
ciety is to be saved by men and women who 



£o VTun of tDedfy 29 



shall pour their lives and possessions as 
streams of love and service into the great 
current of Christ's redeeming life, whose 
onflowing is healing the nations. 

Cfje Kingbom is at fyanb. 

The whole question of labor and capital, 
and all the problems of our day, can be re- 
stated in this form : Is the Gospel of Jesus 
livable ? God is calling to-day for able men 
who are willing to be financially crucified in 
order to establish the world's market on a 
Golden Rule basis. He is calling for noble 
women who are willing to be socially cruci- 
fied to make society the agency for uplifting 
instead of crushing the poor and ignorant 
and weak. " Whoever, " says Benjamin 
Franklin, "introduces into the public affairs 
the principles of primitive Christianity will 
change the face of the world." It is for this 
work that God would anoint you, O Chris- 
tian business men of America! History has 
never presented to man an opportunity 
richer than yours. You can make the mar- 



30 Cfye ZTTessage of ^sns 



ket as sacred as the church. You can make 
the whirl of industrial wheels like the joyous 
music of worship. You can be the knights 
of the noblest chivalry the world has ever 
seen; not going forth "to recover the tomb 
of a buried god," as Ruskin said of the 
crusaders of Richard Lionheart, but to fulfill 
the commands of the eternal Christ. And 
where you go, flowers of hope will spring in 
your footprints. You can bear the weak in 
your arms, and set the captives of poverty 
free. You can cause the deserts of human 
despair to blossom with the gladness of ful- 
filled prophecy, and hush the voices of dis- 
content in the sweetness of fruitful toil. 
You can give work to the wageless ; teach 
the thriftless and ignorant ; seat the poor in 
the best pews of your churches. You need 
not strive nor cry, nor wear plumes and 
flaunt banners ; but you can be the heralds 
of a new civilization, the creators of a Chris- 
tian industry whose peaceful procession will 
reach around the globe. You need carry no 
crosses of wood or gold or silver ; but you 



Co Zlten of IPedtf?. 31 



can bury the cross of your Christ deep with- 
in your hearts and stretch forth consecrated 
hands to realize the life of humanity by 
upraising it into the idealism of Jesus. You 
can draw the world's trades and traffics with- 
in the onsweep of Christ's redemptive pur- 
pose. You can plant everlasting peace 
underneath the feet of men, so that there 
shall be no more strife ; and light earth's 
night of toil with skies of love, so that there 
shall be no more night. You can be the 
makers of the new earth wherein dwelleth 
righteousness ; in which the race will be at 
last human because it is divine, and divine 
because it is human. 

God's new day of judgment is surely and 
swiftly dawning. Voices from out the 
future are crying repentance unto this mam- 
mon-worshiping generation. The axe is laid 
at the root of the trees. New John Baptists 
are arising who will speak truth and justice 
to the Herods of finance, though their ec- 
clesiastical heads be the price of the mes- 
sage. 



32 Cfye Zttessage of 3esus, 



In the lead of human progress I see the 
matchless figure of the Son of God — 

" Toiling up new Calvaries ever with the cross that 
turns not back." 

Behold the Lamb of God that beareth 
away the sin of the world. Let us close 
about him, O brother men, and keep step 
with the march of the cross ! 

" Till upon earth's grateful sod 
Rests the city of our God." 



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